Build and Teach the Web

A track for the Mozilla Festival, London

In the autumn of 2013, after 6 months of feverish planning and late-night Skype conversations, 2,100 technologists from 50 nations descended on Ravensbourne College in London, facilitating 250 sessions, drinking 7,650 cups of coffee and spawning an infinite number of new ideas for Mozfest, the world’s most “fiercely unconventional” 2-day open technology festival.

This year was Mozilla’s biggest yet, with 12 themed tracks ranging from Open Privacy to Open Badges to Open Games. And this year, Laura Hilliger and I had agreed to curate an entire floor of crazy at the event called Build and Teach the Web… which became the craziest (and busiest!) track of the festival.

The focus? Bringing together digital makers and educators of different kinds to build new tools, curriculums and ideas for the creation and sharing of digital knowledges. To prepare, we put together a chaotic set of activities including a massive green screen, scrum tables and scavenger hunts, covering all surfaces with post-it notes and building a massive Scrum Board of tasks that could be done together, centered on 7 themes from Cultural Archives to Glitch Remix to Diversity, all suggested through a set of community planning sessions with the 60+ facilitators who came together to build the track with us. Our aim? To move as many Scrum Tasks as possible from “To Make” to “Made”.

And to our immense relief, Mozfesters dug in and took to the challenge with enthusiasm, shipping more than ¾ of the Scrums together and creating a remarkably welcoming, creative space where creative teaching methods could be shared openly with all.